- Today we're talking about the top 10 free Roku apps
out there.
Now I do these videos a couple of times a year,
and I'm gonna keep doing them a couple of times a year
because frankly, my lists keep changing around.
And this one is no different.
There's a lot to go through in this top 10.
So let's get started, hang with me. Let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
Now, thanks for joining me today, everybody.
Don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoy this video,
or if it's helpful to you.
Now let's get into the top 10.
Now, first things first, let's knock this out.
I'm gonna show you how to download,
how to find and download these apps on your Roku.
So if you're brand new to Roku, this'll be helpful to you.
If you're not, if you already know how to do this,
you can safely skip ahead a few seconds.
All right now, I'm gonna hit the home button.
It brings me this menu on the left here.
We're gonna come down here to streaming channels.
You can also go straight to search,
but you can go right here to streaming channels.
And then you've got a few options.
You can look through their featured list.
You can look at some new stuff.
This is what I do often if I'm looking for, you know,
stuff that I haven't heard of before that pops up on these,
the Roku ecosystem.
But right down here, you can search for channels.
So if I'm talking about something in this video
that you wanna grab, then you just come over here
and let's say, oh, okay yeah,
I really wanna get Spotify music, okay.
And then you can search for that and it'll pull it up
and you just download that channel.
I already have it, so it shows it there.
All right, so back to our homepage,
let's talk about our top 10 list.
Now it's tempting to think that YouTube
will be the first one that I talk about.
I'm actually gonna save it for last.
I'll tell you why, but let's start with Pluto.
Now we're gonna start with some of the mainstays
of the free ecosystem here like Pluto TV.
If you don't know what this is,
this is basically a free platform that mimics
your experience on cable.
Okay, so Pluto TV gives you live channels for free.
It is commercial supported, like many of the free apps are.
So it's commercial supported.
All you need to do is pop in and you get a list
just like you had on cable or satellite.
The only difference is that it has different channels.
Sometimes it'll be offshoots, you know,
kind of the offspring of your cable channels.
So if I come up here,
I can go to a different categories and search for, you know,
movies, entertainment, whatever.
Okay, let's go to entertainment, Paramount Plus Picks.
So this isn't the Paramount Plus app.
It's not the Paramount Channel.
It's Paramount Plus Picks.
And so they'll throw a few things on there for you to watch
for free again, commercial supported.
It's a great app.
Next up, and kind of sticking with the theme of, you know,
you don't wanna quite give up
your cable or satellite routes just yet.
The Roku app has a section that is similar
to what we just saw on Pluto.
So you can come down here to live TV,
check out the channel guide
and they have kind of a similar thing going on.
Okay, so I've got some parental controls on there.
I forgot to turn them off.
So I'm only getting the kids channels right now,
but regardless it is still there.
But with the Roku Channel you get, yes,
you get lots of kids content.
You also get lots of adult content as well.
And Roku recently, I guess recently,
about six months ago bought all of the Quibi originals.
So they are starting the process
of creating their own original content as well, presumably,
but they're starting by purchasing the stuff from Quibi.
So yeah, there are things that you can find here
that you won't find anywhere else.
And presumably that will become even more and more
of a thing here on the Roku Channel.
After the Roku Channel, we got Peacock.
Peacock is the closest thing we have here
to a premier style streaming service.
Peacock is NBC's streaming service.
The thing about it is, it's got a free tier.
So you can pay five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month,
depending on how many commercials you wanna watch
and how much library you want to see, but you don't have to.
Okay, you can just get the free version
and then you get access to about half of the library
on Peacock.
It's not bad.
I will admit it gets a little bit frustrating
when you're on the free tier, because you know,
they keep kind of nudging you to pay up
so you can get the rest of the library.
But regardless, you do get quite a bit of stuff on here.
And it would be weird for me not to mention that Peacock
is a great free channel.
They do have a lot of great stuff on here,
even on the free tier.
After Peacock, we've got PBS Kids.
This is another one that shows up all the time
on my top 10 lists like this, just 'cause it's so fantastic.
It's so free, and it's not commercial supported.
It's PBS.
Yeah, they'll run a few PBS commercials now and then,
but that's really about it.
So PBS Kids or the PBS app itself for the full experience
are great.
You just log into your local PBS station at pbs.org.
And then once you're logged in,
you tell them where you live,
then they'll let you sign in on the Roku app.
And you get access to that whole library.
Again, whether it's kid content
or whether it's adult PBS content, it's all there.
It's fantastic.
Can't recommend it highly enough if you're into PBS.
Now let's do a twofer.
I've got IMDb TV and Tubi.
Both of which are very similar in that they are
kind of commercial supported Netflix imitators.
Well, okay, IMDb TV is more of a Prime Video imitator,
I guess, because they're both owned by Amazon.
But essentially the idea here is
you get a library of titles, whether it's shows or movies,
and you can watch them just like on Netflix.
The only difference is it's commercial supported.
So you don't have to pay anything.
But yeah, you are going to pay in a little bit of extra time
whenever you wanna watch one of these.
Now the other trick with these free services like IMDb TV
and like Tubi, is to a certain extent
and depending on your tastes,
they may not have as attractive a library as you would get
on the premium paid services like Netflix, like HBO Max,
or what have you.
But frankly, that is a generalized statement.
There is a lot of good stuff on both of these,
or on all of these really, on all these services.
So yeah, there are a lot of good titles.
There's just a lot of filler as well, that's all.
So yeah, you can always find something to watch
if you're willing to sit through a few commercials
now and then.
When it comes to news, I'm always bouncing back and forth
on which news app is the best one.
But right now my heart is definitely with Haystack News.
Haystack News is a really, really great one-stop shop,
whether you're looking for national or local news stories.
So with this one,
you can see I'm located here near the Ogden, Utah market.
So they give me local stories here
from one of our local affiliates.
It's not gonna give you all your local affiliates
as far as I know, generally speaking,
but you can also search by category.
You can check out national news, like I said.
One nice thing that I like is if you come up here to say,
my headlines, and you just click on that one.
It will cycle through a bunch of different stories
from different sources.
So national news, local news,
it'll just keep cycling through.
So if news is important to you, you wanna stay updated,
Haystack is the best place to do it,
as far as I'm concerned for free.
Dust is probably the most niche app that I have on this list
because it is all sci-fi stuff.
But it continues to be so cool, so fun,
for somebody who is into this type of content
that I had to include it in this, my top 10 free apps.
So yeah, it may not appeal to you.
And if so, I'm sorry, you could skip ahead 30 seconds.
But if it does, if you like sci-fi content, then yeah,
go ahead and pop into Dust and check out.
They've got a lot of shorts, and a lot of shorts.
Most of the stuff that they do is shorter content, you know,
five to 20 minutes.
But they do have some full length content on here as well.
It's all sci-fi and much of it, I won't say all of it,
but much of it is actually really, really good.
Last up on my list is Plex. I've done a full review of Plex.
And so if you wanna check that out,
you can go check it out right here.
I'll try to remember to link to it up there.
But Plex is, it's a lot of everything wrapped
into one plus a little bit more.
So Plex gives you access to a library of titles.
You can watch On Demand shows and movies.
You can watch live TV,
kind of similar to what we were talking about with Pluto
or with the Roku Channel.
Kind of these offshoot channels that you can watch live.
So those are there as well.
But the nice thing about Plex is you can go
onto their website and upload your own content.
So if you have DVDs, or home movies, or music,
whatever you wanna put on here,
you can put your own stuff,
upload your own stuff into the cloud and watch it
on the Plex server.
So like I said, I go into more detail on my own review.
So go check that out if you wanna learn more
about how it works.
But if you have your own physical library,
then Plex becomes indispensable in being able to watch that
on the big screen.
All right, I said lastly, but I didn't mean it
because like I said, I need to come back to YouTube.
YouTube is the last one I wanna talk about.
This one seems obvious,
but the thing is while we all use YouTube, I mean,
you're probably watching me on YouTube right now.
We don't all necessarily understand
just how big and extensive you YouTube has become.
So when you come into the YouTube app,
you can see here on the left-hand side,
there are a bunch of different categories
that you have here that cover much
of what we already talked about.
Okay, so they're not going to have the same library
of content that you would find on Tubi or IMDb TV.
They're not gonna have the same kind of channels
that you'd get on Pluto or whatever,
but the same kind of idea is here.
So I mentioned news on Haystack.
You're probably gonna get more and more extensive stuff
as far as menu content on Haystack,
but YouTube gives you live feeds
on the most important topics of the day.
But then they also have shorter clips on various topics
that you can go check out, obviously, music, gaming,
movies and shows.
This is the one I was talking about where it kind of
does the same thing that a lot of these other apps do.
You can watch shows free with ads.
Okay, they've got a whole category of that.
You've got recommended movies.
You've got YouTube originals that you can go check out.
Things that you can buy or rent. YouTube does it all.
And of course, if you can't think of anything to watch,
you can always come here to the home screen and just scroll
through the stuff that they recommend.
Obviously, YouTube has bajillions of hours of content
out there.
It's the most popular app in the world for a reason.
So if you don't have this on your Roku,
you're failing at Roku.
All right, so that should do it.
That's my list, but I wanna hear you sound off.
Hit the comments below.
If there's an app that you think is absolutely indispensable
for someone's free app library,
then let me know in the comments.
And as always, if you enjoy this video or if it's helpful,
don't forget to give it a like.
And I will see you on Fridays at 2PM
for the live streams that we do right here on this channel.
They're always a lot of fun.
We do giveaways, we do quizzes, and Q&As,
and all sorts of fun stuff.
So hope to see you there. Thanks for watching.
See you next time.